Chapter 15
The bell over the door of the Bayview General Store had a particular voice.
Winnie knew it the way she knew the lighthouse stairs, every creak in its order.
She let herself in before the shop sign was flipped to open.
The same as she had for more years than she cared to count.
Sally didn't look up from the carton she was slicing open.
"Coffee's fresh," Sally said. "Or what passes for fresh around here."
"That's a low bar."
"Drink it anyway."
Winnie poured a cup and took it black, the way she always had.
She carried it down the canned-goods aisle where Sally was opening the boxes.
The store smelled of cardboard and floor wax.
Underneath that ran the faint sweetness of the penny candy Sally still kept by the register, though no child had paid in pennies for fifty years.
"Hand me those," Sally said, nodding at a stack of soup cans. "Might as well make yourself useful. Standing there looking decorative."
"Decorative." Winnie set down her cup. "There's a word nobody's used on me in some time."
"Their loss."
They worked the way they'd always worked.
In half-sentences and easy quiet. Sally talked, and Winnie answered when an answer was needed, and stayed silent when it wasn't. The cans went up in their rows, labels facing out.
Winnie's hands ached a little in the cool of the store.
They knew the work anyway. Tomato. Chicken and rice.
The split pea nobody ever bought. She lined them up while Sally moved on to the crackers.
"So," Sally said, not turning around. "Sam."
And there it was.
"What about him?"
"That's what I'm asking you." Sally fitted a box of saltines into a gap and stepped back to judge it. "How is it, having him around again? After all this time."
"It's fine."
"Mm."
"It is. It's fine."
"You said fine twice." Sally turned around, a sleeve of crackers still in her hand. "You only ever say fine twice when it isn't."
Winnie reached for another can. The soup, again. She turned the label out, squared it against its neighbor, and took longer to do it than the job deserved.
"He had soup with me the other night," she said.
Sally's eyebrows went up. "Did he?"
"It was soup, Sally. From a pot. Nothing more than that." Winnie heard her own voice climb and reined it in. "He'd been out at the lighthouse with Melissa, taking his pictures. It was late. I had supper on. That's the whole of it."
"Uh-huh."
"It was nothing."
"You keep telling me what it wasn't." Sally went back to her crackers, but gentler now, the way she handled things she didn't want to break. "I'm still waiting to hear what it was."
Winnie didn't answer right away. The fan ticked. A truck went by out on the road and rattled the front glass. The light shifted on the floorboards. She stood there with a can of chicken and rice in her hand and tried to find the way to say it.
"It's harder than I thought it would be," she finally admitted.
There. Out loud, in the open, where she couldn't take it back.
"Oh, honey." Sally set the crackers down for good. "Of course it is. After all this time. All that heartache."
"No." The word came out fast. "That's the thing of it. It isn't the old hurt." She shook her head. "I went looking for it. You understand? I sat across my own table from him and went hunting for the part of me that still holds on to the heartache. And it wasn't that."
"Then what is it?"
"It's the hope."
Sally went still.
"I buried that so deep." Winnie's thumb found the sea glass bracelet, the wire warm from her own skin. "I don't know how deep. You bury a thing, and it stays buried, because that's what burying is for."
"And?"
"And then he sat there eating my soup, asking about the second buoy like it was yesterday. And the hope came up out of the ground like it had never been gone." She made a small helpless gesture. "Forty-five years, Sally. It just came up."
"Things do," Sally said.
"He remembered the buoy. Do you understand what I'm telling you? A man with a grandson and a whole life behind him, and he remembered which buoy we rowed past to test the light." Winnie set the can down. "He shouldn't remember that. I'd have forgiven him for forgetting that."
"But he didn't."
"No, he didn't. And that's… It's foolish."
"Now there's a word nobody should use on you."
Winnie laughed, a small worn-out laugh. She picked up her coffee and took a sip.
"Some things survive burial," Sally said. "Maybe that's their whole point. Maybe that's how a person knows which things were real." She leaned a hip against the shelving and crossed her arms over her apron. "You ever think of it that way?"
"I try not to think of it any way at all."
"How's that working?"
"Poorly."
The bell over the door cut in before Sally could answer. A man in a sun-faded ball cap came in for a bag of ice and a roll of fishing line. Sally rang him up and asked after his wife's hip. The doctor was pleased, he said. Out he went, the bell singing behind him.
The quiet came back. Sally turned to Winnie like there'd been no interruption at all.
"You handle half this town's business in that aisle," Winnie said. "Hips, weddings, and whose boy's run off where."
"Somebody has to. People don't come in here for the milk." Sally wiped her hands on her apron. "Pour yourself another cup of coffee. And tell me the rest of it. I know there's more."
Winnie sighed. "There's always more, with you waiting on it."
"That's my job. Now pour."
Winnie poured. She wrapped both hands around the warm cup and looked at the row of cans she'd squared. All those labels lined up like soldiers. So much of her life had gone into making small things look orderly.
"My new tenant," she said. "The writer. Fiona."
"Sea Glass Cottage. The one you keep feeding."
"You remember she asked me about the Copelands at the Friday night gathering at the fire pit?"
"I remember."
"She got that look writers get, like they're on to a good story."
"You don't owe a stranger your history."
"No. But it stirred everything up." She looked past the faded specials taped to the front glass, out to where the road bent toward the water. "All of it. Things I've spent decades not thinking about. And the worst of it, the part I can't set down, is that I don't even know what I'm protecting."
"I know, you've said that." Sally nodded.
"I never knew. My father told me the Copelands couldn't be trusted.
That we had to protect what my grandfather built.
That promises mattered more than happiness.
" She drew a slow breath. "He looked frightened when he said it.
My father. The man who wasn't afraid of a hurricane coming up the Gulf looked frightened of a family we'd had supper with. "
"And he never explained."
"He died before he could. I have to believe he was going to explain." She shook her head. "But then he was gone. And I was left holding a secret I've never once been able to see the full truth of."
The store was very quiet. Even the fan seemed to have given up.
She looked at Sally. "I knew it cost me Sam. That much I'm sure of. The rest is a locked room. I've stood guard outside it for fifty years, and I couldn't tell you what's inside if my life depended on the telling."
"You were always good at standing guard."
"It was the family trade. Right alongside the lamp." Winnie almost smiled. "My grandfather guarded it. My father guarded it. They handed it down to me like the keeper's keys, and not one of them thought to write down what it was I'd be guarding. Just that I should."
"That is a strange inheritance."
"It's the only kind I got." She frowned. "I used to tell myself the not-knowing was a mercy. That a person can't let slip what she never learned. There was a comfort in it, almost. I could keep the promise without ever worrying about telling something I shouldn't."
"And now?"
"Now a stranger says one name at my own fire, and the whole thing comes loose." Winnie shook her head. "I'm too old to be unsettled this easy, Sally. I keep waiting to feel settled, and it keeps not coming."
Sally was quiet a moment. Then she pushed off the shelving, came down the aisle, and started restacking the soup cans Winnie had already stacked. That was her way of keeping her hands busy while she said something difficult.
"Then maybe it's time you found out," she said.
"Sally."
"I mean it. You've got the man himself at your own table, eating your soup.
He's been chasing the same ghost his whole life.
You told me that yourself." She set a can down with a small definite click.
"Between the two of you, you've got both halves of it.
Maybe it's time to stop guarding that room and open the door. "
"I'm not sure I'm ready for that."
"Ready." Sally said the word like it tasted off. "Listen to yourself. Ready."
"It's no small thing, opening that door. There's no closing it after." Winnie paused. "Anyway, I've kept it this long. Where's the harm in keeping it a while more? Until I've thought it through. Until I'm sure."
"Sure of what?"
"I don't know. Sure I can stand whatever's behind it."
Sally turned and looked at her. Full on, the way she rarely did. A lifetime of years lived inside that look. The two of them at seven, hiding behind the feed store. Later, burying parents. And now this. Two old women among the soup cans, with the morning getting on.
"Honey," Sally said. "You're seventy. When exactly were you planning to be ready?"
Winnie almost smiled. "That's… accurate."
"It's the truth." Sally crossed to her, took the cup out of Winnie's hands, and set it on the shelf.
Then she held both of Winnie's hands in both of hers, gnarled fingers and all, and made nothing of the holding.
"You've spent your whole life keeping that light for everybody else.
Keeping promises. Keeping secrets. Keeping that poor man at arm's length because somebody told you to before I was even old enough to talk sense into you. "
"Sally."
"I watched you do it. I stood right here and watched you choose the lighthouse over your own heart. I never said a word, because it wasn't mine to say." Her grip tightened, just for a second. "I'm saying it now. You don't have forty-five more years to get ready in. Neither does he."
Winnie looked down at their hands. At the bracelet on her wrist. The sea glass had gone soft and cloudy with the years, the silver wire wound around each piece by Sam's own two hands the summer she was twenty-four.
Promises kept. She'd told that lie to so many people for so long that she'd half come to believe it.
Maybe it had never been a promise kept at all. Maybe it had only ever been a door she was too afraid to open.
"You're a hard woman," she said.
"I'm a good friend. You confuse the two." Sally let go and stepped back, and her face cracked into the grin Winnie had loved since they were girls. "Now. Are you going to help me finish these crackers, or stand there spilling your feelings all over my clean floor?"
"The floor isn't clean."
"It was, before you brought your mood in here." Sally nudged a box toward her with one foot. "Go on. Crackers won't shelve themselves, and goodness knows you need something to do with those hands besides worry that bracelet."
Winnie laughed for real this time. It loosened something high inside her that had been wound tight since Fiona said the name Copeland at the fire. She bent for the next box of saltines and fitted it into the row, labels out. Beside her Sally hummed something tuneless.
A man called good morning from the doorway, wanting bait and the marine forecast. Sally went to see to him.
Winnie stayed a moment with her hand resting on the cool tin of a soup can, looking out the front glass to where a gull crossed the road toward the water.
She watched it until it was gone from the frame of the window.
Then she reached for another box and went back to work.